Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics

By P. J. O'Rourke

A New York Times bestseller: “The funniest writer in America” takes on the global economy (The Wall Street Journal).
 
In this book, renowned political humorist P. J. O’Rourke, author of Parliament of Whores and How the Hell Did This Happen? leads us on a hysterical whirlwind world tour from the “good capitalism” of Wall Street to the “bad socialism” of Cuba in search of the answer to an age-old question: “Why do some places prosper and thrive, while others just suck?” With stops in Albania, Sweden, Hong Kong, Moscow, and Tanzania, O’Rourke takes a look at the complexities of economics with a big dose of the incomparable wit that has made him one of today’s most refreshing commentators.
 
“O’Rourke has done the unthinkable: he’s made money funny.” —Forbes FYI
 
“[O’Rourke is] witty, smart and—though he hides it under a tough coat of cynicism—a fine reporter . . . Delightful.” —The New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781555847104

P. J. O'Rourke

P. J. O'Rourke is the bestselling author of ten books, including Eat the Rich, Give War a Chance, Holidays in Hell, Parliament of Whores, All the Trouble in the World, The CEO of the Sofa and Peace Kills. He has contributed to, among other publications, Playboy, Esquire, Harper's, New Republic, the New York Times Book Review and Vanity Fair. He is a regular correspondent for the Atlantic magazine. He divides his time between New Hampshire and Washington, D.C.

Book preview

EAT THE RICH

ALSO BY P. J. O’ROURKE

Modern Manners

The Bachelor Home Companion

Republican Party Reptile

Holidays in Hell

Parliament of Whores

Give War a Chance

All the Trouble in the World

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut

The CEO of the Sofa

Peace Kills

On The Wealth of Nations

EAT THE RICH

P. J. O’ROURKE

Copyright © 1998 by P. J. O’Rourke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catologing-in-Publication Data

O’Rourke, P. J.

Eat the rich / P. J. O’Rourke.

p.    cm.

ISBN-10: 0-87113-760-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-87113-760-9

1. Economics—Humor. 2. Money—Humor. I. Title.

PN6231.E295076 1998

330’ .02’07—dc21

98-27100

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

07 08 09 10      10 9 8 7 6

FOR TINA AND ELIZABETH

CONTENTS

1 LOVE, DEATH, AND MONEY

2 GOOD CAPITALISM: Wall Street

3 BAD CAPITALISM: Albania

4 GOOD SOCIALISM: Sweden

5 BAD SOCIALISM: Cuba

6 FROM BEATNIK TO BUSINESS MAJOR:

Taking Econ 101 for Kicks

7 HOW (OR HOW NOT) TO REFORM (MAYBE) AN ECONOMY

(IF THERE IS ONE): Russia

8 HOW TO MAKE NOTHING FROM EVERYTHING: Tanzania

9 HOW TO MAKE EVERYTHING FROM NOTHING: Hong Kong

10 HOW TO HAVE THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS: Shanghai

11 EAT THE RICH

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I stole the title. But I don’t know from whom I stole it. I may have lifted it from the 1993 Aerosmith CD Get a Grip, which has a song by the same name. But Colorado journalist Dan Dunn informs me that Aerosmith might have nicked it, too. Dunn says there’s a tune with that moniker on Motorhead’s 1988 album, Rock’n’Roll. And Motorhead may have filched the thing themselves, because I first saw the phrase on T-shirts worn by the Shi’ite Amal militia in Lebanon in 1984 or 1985. I don’t know where the Amal got the phrase, but I assure you that they stole the T-shirts. Perhaps Eat the Rich is a part of the world’s folk-music heritage, the original version to be unearthed, by some archivist, from a forgotten Folkways recording, Songs of the Economic Advisers:

Kill the poor,

Eat the rich,

Screw every other son-of-a-bitch.

The rest of the book is my own work, for good or for ill, although I had a tremendous amount of help putting it together. As has been the case for the past thirteen years, Rolling Stone paid for the travel. All the foreign adventures and my trip to Wall Street first appeared, in modified form, in that magazine, and part of Chapter II appeared in Rolling Stone’s brother publication Men’s Journal. I owe a huge debt of gratitude (and unfinished assignments) to Rolling Stone’s founder and editor in chief, Jann S. Wenner. Besides being a good friend, he has been a remarkably tolerant boss. Rolling Stone already had someone writing about political-economy issues, my ideological pal-in-opposition, National Affairs editor William Greider. When I went to Jann in 1995 and told him I wanted to write about economics, he was momentarily taken aback. But he didn’t fire me. He just sighed and said, You mean I now have two lunatic economists on the staff of a rock and roll magazine?

Part of Chapter X also appeared in the London Sunday Telegraph. Editor Dominic Lawson thereby allowed me to get my anti-British feelings about the Hong Kong handover off my chest in a way that would offend the largest number of British people. Sorry. I’m over it. I now realize that if I’d owned Hong Kong, I would have given it back to the Chinese, too. Although not until they bought me some drinks. But I’m Irish.

This book could not have been finished—or, at least, published—if I hadn’t gotten fabulous and fabulously necessary editorial help from Andrew Ferguson, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, and gotten good advice and hand-holding from Denise Ferguson. Whatever shape and structure the book has is due to Andy. The flabby and pointless parts are (as in my person, so in my work) mine The manuscript was then vetted by Nicholas Eberstadt, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and visiting fellow at Harvard’s Center for Population Studies, and by Mary Eberstadt, writer for The Weekly Standard and other fine journals. Nick did his best to make the logic of my economic arguments actually logical and tried to show me how to use statistics in an unstupid manner. Mary helped put flesh and (more’s the pity) blood into the descriptions of the damage that totalitarianism does to people, and she tactfully pointed out a number of not-unstupid solecisms.

The magazine pieces that formed the raw material of this book were assigned and, in many cases, conceived by Rolling Stone managing editor Robert Love. His editorial craftsmanship was great, and his patience was extreme. Bob has a knowledge of journalistic storytelling, something that has always eluded me. Specifically he knows what part of a story is the beginning, what part is the middle, and what part is the end—no small matter to the reader. Also a blessing was the help I received on Chapter II from an old friend, Men’s Journal editor Terry McDonell, the person who hired me at Rolling Stone in the first place. Terry and Men’s Journal senior editor David Willey helped me to explain high finance without exposing myself as the person who, in 1997, bought precious metals, held on to Japanese yen, and sold Pfizer short.

An enormous amount of unsung research-and-development grunt work was done by Tobias Perse. And more of the same was accomplished by Mike Guy and Rodd McLeod. Exhaustive—and exhausting—fact checking was done by Mary Christ, Sarah Pratt, Kim Ahearn, Erika Fortgang, and Gina Zucker. Any remaining errors of fact are the result of my own pigheaded persistence in error. Heroic copy-editing tasks (I cannot spell well enough to find the SPELL CHECK icon) were undertaken by Eric Page, Marian Berelowitz, Corey Sabourin, and Thomas Walsh. And Eric Page returned to do a copy edit on the book text and ruin his Memorial Day weekend with a case of Dictionary Eyes because the author didn’t get the manuscript to him until the last possible minute.

The cover photo was taken by the brilliant David Burnett, who always makes me look more or less human. (His secret is that he uses someone else for the model.) Tommy Jacomo, magnificent manager of the Palm in Washington, D.C., threw all the semi-inebriated Capital big suits out of his establishment so that David could take the picture. The Washington Palm is the best restaurant in the world and the only place where you can see James Carville eat something other than Ken Starr’s lunch. The little rich guy running away from me was drawn with skill and flair by Daniel Adel. And the whole cover composition was pulled together by Grove/Atlantic art director Charles Rue Woods, assisted by Whitney Cookman. They are geniuses. (One of the best things about writing Acknowledgments is that it gives a journalist a break from saying bad things about people. Also, sometimes he gets a free lunch.)

There are scores of other people about whom I have good things to say. When I started writing this, I was so ignorant of my subject that I thought economics were plural. A number of friends in the financial industry helped walk me through the basics, particularly Hugh Eaton, Richard Morris, and John Ricciardi, partners in the Cursitor-Eaton Asset Management Company, which is now a part of Alliance Capital; and Briget Polichene, former general counsel for the House Banking Committee. I was also assisted by the faculty and students of the Owen School of Management at Vanderbilt University. Dewey Daane, the Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance, emeritus, and a former governor of the Federal Reserve Board, explained money to me—very slowly and using words even I could understand. Luke Froeb, associate professor of management, gave me a pep talk and a reading list, but, most importantly, donated an item of his own classroom material titled A Traditional Economics Class in Only One Lecture. It was while reading this that economics began to make sense to me, specifically with the first two sentences of Froeb’s text: The chief virtue of a capitalist mode of production is its ability to create wealth. Wealth is created when assets are moved from lower- to higher-valued uses.

My best and most-extensive source of economic understanding, however, was the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank run by President Ed Crane and Executive Vice President David Boaz where I hold the unpaid (and I earn it) position of Mencken Research Fellow. The Cato Institute loves freedom, embraces responsibility, and displays a grumpy nonpartisanship in politics. Plus, donations are tax deductible, so give it a bunch of money. Cato has provided me with research and analysis for all my books for the last ten years. (Except Give War a Chance—folks at Cato believe that killings should be made in the marketplace.) I’d like to thank Ed and David, and Cato scholars Doug Bandow, Ted Carpenter, James Dorn, Stephen Moore, Tom Palmer, Roger Pilon, José Piñera, Jerry Taylor, and the late Julian Simon, and I’d like to thank Nicole Gray for years of getting Cato events together and getting me to those together events.

Another organization that has been a great help and to which I hope I’ve been a little help in return is the National Forum Foundation, founded in 1984 to promote democracy and human rights in places that didn’t have those things. Forum Foundation provided me with contacts in Russia and Cuba. President Jim Denton got me into the various political headquarters during the 1996 Moscow elections, and chief financial officer Therese Lyons showed me around St. Petersburg. The National Forum Foundation has since merged with Freedom House, which has been fighting the same excellent battles since it was started in 1941 by political odd couple Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Wilkie. Jim and Therese now serve, respectively, as the executive director and the vice president for finance and administration in the new organization. You should give it a bunch of money, too.

The chapter on Good Capitalism would not have been possible if some of the best capitalists in America hadn’t been willing to waste hours answering Kiddie Investment Klub-type questions from me. That time could have been turned into money, but instead it’s become prose. Therefore it is both heart- and wallet-felt thanks that I give to Michael Meehan, Sean McCarthy, Merrill Lichtenfeld, Tom Leander, Al Ehrbar, Alan Braunshweiger, Jeffrey Leeds, Jay Duryea, Kevin O’Brien, Myron Scholes, and Robert Merton. And thanks to Kim Kirkpatrick for the Scotch-and-Water Park joke.

In Albania, Eton Tocaj and Dave Brauchli were a tremendous amount of help with important things, such as keeping me from getting killed.

In Sweden, Peter Stein played a splendid Virgil to my poor imitation of Dante as we toured the environs of socialistic Heck. The people I met there were forthcoming, welcoming, and kind even though they knew I was going to make fun of their country. (Thanks, by the way, to Peter Berlin, author of The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Swedes, for the phrase orgy-borgy.) In Stockholm I was treated to innumerable dinners, lunches, and intelligent conversations, and maybe there’s something to that Social-Democrat nonsense after all—as long as I keep my legal residence in New Hampshire for tax purposes. My thanks to Odd and Ingrid Eiken, Thomas Gür, Anders Isaksson, Jean Louis Gave, Nils-Eric and Kerstin Sandberg, Carl and Jeanne Rudbeck, Johann Kugelberg, Rolf Albert, Eva Norlin, Äke Ortmark, Thomas Atmer, Elizabeth Langby, the Swedish free-market think tank Timbro, and to American ambassador Thomas Siebert and his wife, Deborah.

Sweden, however, does have an evil twin—Cuba. The darker side of socialism was made less dark by David Beard, Chris Isham, Jennifer Maguire, Pascal Fletcher, Douglas W. Payne from Freedom House, and Frank Calzòn, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.

Jonas Bernstein did everything possible in the way of finding all the pieces with a straight edge in that gigantic jigsaw puzzle that is Russia. I’d like to thank him and Richard Conn, David Nunley, Michael Caputo, Dmitry Volkov, Claudia Rosett, the Honorable Chris Cox, Garry Kasparov (who introduced me to the Boris Yeltsin campaign staff—let’s see Big Blue do that), Intourist guides Ana and Paul, the International Republican Institute, and the Jamestown Foundation.

My travel through Tanzania would have been pointless without the intelligence, information, and friendship of J. J., who did all the hard work. The trip was arranged by the commendable firm of Abercrombie & Kent. I thank Edward Hudgins of the Cato Institute, and Rahim Azad and Kephas Mavipya for the insights they provided, and Zanzibar’s Mbweni Ruins Hotel and Mnemba Club for welcome respites from journalism.

The handover of Hong Kong to China was a grim occasion and also a great party. It was homecoming week at the Foreign Correspondents Club. Thanks for all the tips (and tipples) I got there from past president and old (and, John, I do mean old) friend John Giannini, present president Keith Richburg (whose book Out of America was also a big help in writing about Tanzania), Dave and Celia Garcia, Hugh and Annie Van Es, Jimmy Lai, and Bill and Julie McGurn. (And special thanks to Bill for his articles and essays on Sir John Cowperthwaite.) The handover ceremonies were also turned into fun by the totally amusing company of Lauren Hutton, John Cleese, Alyce Faye Eichelberger, David Tang, Dominic Lawson, and Rosa Monckton. I look forward to seeing all of you again at the next triumph of bad governance—maybe in Belfast.

And my visit to Shanghai would have been much less comprehensible without Yeung Wai Hong and Kate Xiao Zhou, and much less pleasurable without Jim Whitaker and my fellow members of the cobra-blood-drinking fraternity: Jerry Taylor, Gary Dempsey, and Aaron Lukas.

I want to thank my publisher and friend Morgan Entrekin and everyone at Grove/Atlantic for printing this book (probably against their better judgment) and paying me for it (definitely against their better judgment). I want to thank Grove/Atlantic’s Associate Publisher Eric Price, Director of Publicity and Marketing Judy Hottensen, Managing Editor Michael Hornburg, Assistant Editor Amy Hundley, Subsidiary Rights Manager Lauren Wein, and all the other people whom authors do not customarily thank and without whom authors would have nothing but wiggles on a computer screen to show for their efforts.

My gratitude to Scott Manning for arranging the book tour and putting up with my ingratitude while I’m out touring and am temporarily under the impression that fifty-year-old writers should act like twenty-year-old rock-band drummers.

More gratitude to my longtime and long-suffering agent, Bob Dattila, who barely winced when I proposed a book on economics (Oh, Hollywood is going to leap on that). And more gratitude yet to Jacqui Graham, who keeps publishing me in Britain despite my continued outbursts of provincial Anglophobia, and to Don Epstein and everyone at Greater Talent Network, who keep finding people who will pay me for lecturing so that I don’t have to get a real job or write books that can be made into movies.

With all these thanks said, I now come to one of the great conundrums of literature. How does one give full and sufficient credit to one’s wife without sounding like a mealymouthed pig or giving the readers mental images of the tambourine-playing spouse in This Is Spinal Tap? I’m going to go for mealymouthed pig. Tina O’Rourke has a business degree and understands the stuff in this book, which is more than its author does. She accompanied me on several of the foreign trips, or, I should say, I accompanied her. She helped with the travel arrangements and tour research. To her I owe the slogan America—it doesn’t suck. And Tina, supplied with Rolling Stone journalist credentials for the Cuba trip, was forced at one point to actually ask a pop-music star, What’s your favorite color? Then, as this book was being written, Tina edited, fact-checked, proofread, entered the whole manuscript into the word processor that remains a Delphic mystery to her husband, managed the household, changed diapers, and gave our infant daughter her 1 A.M., 3 A.M., 3:30 A.M., 3:45 A.M., 4 A.M., and 5 A.M. feedings while I . . . stared out my office window and picked adverbs. Thank you for not killing me, dear.

A NOTE ABOUT THE BIBLIOGRAPHY

There isn’t one. I’m too lazy. And who ever heard of humor with footnotes? But there are certain books which I found crucial to a neophyte student of economics, especially if (and I mean no insult to the texts by this) that student is uninformed, innumerate, light-minded, and a big goof-off. In other words, these are the books to read if you want to know something about economics but have never gotten further into the subject than figuring out a trifecta at Belmont:

Free to Choose and Capitalism and Freedom by Milton and Rose Friedman

New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd G. Buchholz

The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

The Tyranny of Numbers by Nicholas Eberstadt

How the West Grew Rich by Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell Jr.

The Armchair Economist by Steven E. Landsburg

The History of Money by Jack Weatherford

Money, A History edited by Jonathan Williams

There are also certain books you should avoid, such as anything with the words Investment and Success in the title and everything ever written by John Kenneth Galbraith.

A NOTE ABOUT THE NUMBERS IN THIS BOOK

How accurate are the statistics in the following pages? How long is a piece of string? All statistics are fraught with error. And I, personally, cannot add a 15 percent tip to a ten-dollar bar tab and get the same number twice. Not that I’ve ever had a bar tab as small as ten dollars. And that may be part of the problem. But, even sober, I’m no mathematician. And neither, apparently, are the other people who publish statistics. For example, I refer the reader to the debates about Cuban gross domestic product in Chapter V and Tanzanian per-capita GDP in Chapter VIII. The numbers seem as random and inadequate as the change I ended up leaving that surly bartender.

Statistics, however, can have some value for comparative purposes, and this is the way I’ve tried to use them. Unless otherwise noted, the population, GDP, vital stats, and other principal figures in Eat the Rich come from the 1997 edition of the CIA’s World Factbook and the 1997 edition of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Statistical Abstract of the United States. Yes, I know, the CIA is the espionage agency that had to read about India’s nuclear tests in The Washington Post. And now Pakistan is making mushroom clouds, too. Pretty soon every cabdriver and 7-Eleven manager in the world will have the bomb. And I also know that the Department of Commerce is no Plato’s Academy in Athens. But the baloney in the Factbook and the Statistical Abstract is presumably all cooked from the same ground-up scraps and innards, and comes packaged in easily compared slices.

Although even our government doesn’t always agree with itself about these things. The FB says the estimated mid-1997 population of the United States is 267,954,764, while the SA says 267,645,000—a discrepancy of almost 310,000 people. That’s as if all the residents of Wichita, Kansas, had disappeared. Check the tornado reports. Call Dorothy. Anyway, when forced to chose between numbers, I’ve picked the CIA’s for the simple reason that nobody’s ever been terminated with extreme prejudice by the Department of Commerce.

There is another problem with the statistics in this book. They’re outdated. All statistics are outdated. They are the record of a certain arbitrary moment, and by the time that record is processed and printed, it is, in effect, your senior-class picture in the high-school yearbook and you’re very embarrassed by last fall’s hairstyle. My statistics are even more outdated than usual, having been collected over a period of two and a half years. It would have been nice if I could have visited eight countries in one week, written about them over the weekend, published my work on Monday, and had an au courant book. But the thing could not be done. I went to Sweden, Cuba, and Russia in 1996. I went to Tanzania, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Wall Street in 1997. And my manuscript went to press in the spring of 1998. Things have changed in all those places. Economic conditions are somewhat better in Sweden, Albania, and Tanzania; worse in Russia and Shanghai. The pope has breezed through Cuba, to what effect I do not know. Hong Kong has suffered less at the hands of the mainland Chinese than I feared it would—so far. And what’s going to happen to the stock market remains the riddle it’s been since 1792, when twenty-four brokers gathered under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street and agreed to a set of rules by which they would sharp and cozen each other.

I ask readers to take the numbers herein with the single grain of salt that the Romans believed to be an antidote to poison. The purpose of this book is to make some broad points about economics, freedom, and responsibility. If the reader examines my work too carefully, he may discover that I’m only a journalist. This means that when it comes to knowing what I’m talking about, I’m no different than the next person; I just get paid for the talking.

"In this state of imbecility, I had, for amusement, turned my

attention to political economy."

—Thomas De Quincey

Confessions of an English Opium Eater

1

LOVE, DEATH, AND MONEY

I had one fundamental question about economics: Why do some places prosper and thrive while others just suck? It’s not a matter of brains. No part of the earth (with the possible exception of Brentwood) is dumber than Beverly Hills, and the residents are wading in gravy. In Russia, meanwhile, where chess is a spectator sport, they’re boiling stones for soup. Nor can education be the reason. Fourth graders in the American school system know what a condom is but aren’t sure about 9 × 7. Natural resources aren’t the answer. Africa has diamonds, gold, uranium, you name it. Scandinavia has little and is frozen besides. Maybe culture is the key, but wealthy regions such as the local mall are famous for lacking it.

Perhaps the good life’s secret lies in civilization. The Chinese had an ancient and sophisticated civilization when my relatives were hunkering naked in trees. (Admittedly that was last week, but they’d been drinking.) In 1000 B.C., when Europeans were barely using metal to hit each other over the head, the Zhou dynasty Chinese were casting ornate wine vessels big enough to take a bath in—something else no contemporary European had done. Yet, today, China stinks.

Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else. And absence of government doesn’t work, either. For a million years mankind had no government at all, and everyone’s relatives were naked in trees. Plain hard work is not the source of plenty. The poorer people are, the plainer and harder is the work that they do. The better-off play golf. And technology provides no guarantee of creature comforts. The most wretched locales in the world are well-supplied with complex and up-to-date technology—in the form of weapons.

Why are some places wealthy and other places poor? It occurred to me, at last, that this might have something to do with money.

But I didn’t know anything about money. I didn’t know anything about money as a practical matter—did I have enough to pay the mortgage? And I didn’t know anything about money in a broad or abstract sense. I certainly didn’t know anything about economic theory. And I wasn’t alone in this.

I couldn’t answer the central question of this book because I was an economic idiot. I got to be an economic idiot by the simple and natural method of being human. Humans have trouble with economics, as you may have noticed, and not just because economic circumstances sometimes cause them to starve. Humans seem to have an innate inability to pay attention to economic principles.

Love, death, and money—these are the three main human concerns. We’re all keen students of love. We are fascinated by every aspect of the matter, in theory and in practice—from precise biological observations of thrusting this and gaping that to ethereal sentimentalities marketed in miles of aisles at Hallmark stores. No variety of love is too trivial for exegesis. No aspect of love is so ridiculous that it hasn’t been exhaustively reviewed by the great thinkers, the great artists, and the great hosts of daytime talk shows.

As for death, such is the public appetite for investigation of the subject that the highest-rated television program in America is about an emergency room. The most hardheaded and unspeculative of persons has his notions of eschatology. The dullest mind can reason extensively about what causes kicking the bucket. Dying sparks our intellectual curiosity.

But money does not. All we care about is the thing itself, preferably in large amounts. We care a very great deal about that. But here our brain work stops. We don’t seem to mind where our money comes from. And, in an affluent society, we don’t even seem to mind where our money goes. As for larger questions about money, we shrug our shoulders and say, I wish I had more.

Why is it that we are earnest scholars of amorosity and necrosis but turn as vague and fidgety as a study hall in June when the topic is economics? I have several hypotheses, none of them very good.

Love and death are limited and personal. Even when free love was in vogue, only a certain number of people would allow us to practice that freedom upon them. A pious man in the throes of Christian agape may love every creature in the world, but he’s unlikely to meet them all. And death is as finite as it gets. It has closure. Plus the death ratio is low, only 1:1 in occurrences per person.

Economics happens a lot more often and involves multitudes of people and uncountable goods and services. Economics is just too complicated. It makes our heads ache. So when anything economic goes awry, we respond in a limited and personal way by searching our suit-coat pockets to see if there are any wadded up fives inside. Then we either pray or vote for Democrats, depending on our personal convictions of faith.

Or maybe economics is so ever present, so pervasive in every aspect of our

Reviews for Eat the Rich

[johnphelan-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Essentially a long Douglass North article or short Acemoglu & Robinson book, O'Rourke's message is 'institutions matter'. This is the book I'd suggest if someone asked me 'Which one economics book should I read?'

[georgeslacombe_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Insightful and ironic journey on economics. The author travels to many countries in order to see by himself why some countries are rich and some are poor. The book was written before China big growth and the recent wars in the old Yugoslavia region. Many comments are attached to the reality of that time, however the overall analysis is still valid, and several insights at that time were almost prophecies. Reading the book now demands more of the reader that should know world history of 1990's and also some personalities, companies, products and trends of that time. I recommend as a good entertainment and also as a way to get a better understanding of the recent world history.

[wyvernfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting look at the perception of wealth and poverty in several different countries around the world. He's looking at the different systems - none of which he shows to be perfect but many of which have both good and bad points.

[bragan_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This "treatise on economics" by political humorist P.J. O'Rourke was written in 1998, which makes it quite a blast from the economic past. In it, O'Rourke asks the question of why some societies are prosperous and wealthy while others aren't. In the interests of finding out, he first makes a half-hearted attempt at learning economic theory, then travels around to various countries, capitalist and socialist, functional and dysfunctional. O'Rourke's political opinions, economic and otherwise, differ significantly from my own -- I believe he considers himself a libertarian, whereas I tend to vote Democrat. So, needless to say, I don't quite share his perspective on a lot of this stuff, and I definitely don't share his conclusions. I also found his attitude towards many of the places he visits faintly irritating, in a vague but persistent kind of way. But even so, by 2010 standards of political discourse -- especially discourse in which the word "socialism" features prominently -- he almost comes across low-key and moderate, if decidedly snarky. This by itself is enough to make me nostalgic for 1998. I don't think I ever properly appreciated the 90s when they were here.O'Rourke does have the capacity to be very, very funny, though. Just skimming through the acknowledgments at the beginning of the book had me laughing several times. But, alas, the chuckles were much fewer and further between in the text itself. I guess maybe even O'Rourke can't make this subject very funny, at least not to those who don't share his biases.

[liggitt-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Interesting, but overly crass.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quite amusing.

[ramirez_3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Thesis: socialists are a bunch of idiots who want us poorer because they're envious and they don't understand the benefits of the Market!1Greed is OK.Pity it's so childish because O'Rourke is also funny.